Totalitarianism and the Covid Cult
Part 3 - Religion
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This is the third part of a chapter on cult indoctrination techniques deployed as part of the “Covid-19” operation. Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.
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The previous instalment of this series hinted at the quasi-religious aspect of cults with its references to doctrine, inculcation of unquestioning belief, and an ultimate moral vision for ordering human existence.
This part delves deeper into the religious aspect of the Covid cult.
Totalitarianism and Political Religion
Once more, there are continuities with totalitarianism. A well-established academic literature exists, for instance, on totalitarianism as “political religion,” i.e.,
a bastardized derivative of traditional religion that seeks to motivate absolute adherence to a secular cause among its followers by borrowing the language, concepts, and mythology of traditional religion and twisting them for its own ends. (Hughes, 2013, p. 354)
The Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt wrote in his book Political Theology (1922) that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt, 2005, p. 36). The idea of an omnipotent God, he argued, had been recast as that of the sovereign lawgiver (as per Descartes’ claim that “It is God who established these laws in nature just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom”).
However, whereas Enlightenment rationalism saw the sovereign as presiding over the law, rather than intervening in it, Schmitt (2005, pp. 41, 47) argued that the legal order could be suspended by an act of sovereign decision — as happened to the Weimar Constitution in 1933. The leader of a totalitarian society (the Führer in Nazi Germany) thus assumed an omnipotent, god-like status, not only standing above the law, but capable of acting outside of it.
Early Nazi circles were influenced by Theosophy, Ariosophy, and the Thule Society, whose swastika emblem they adopted.
Himmler’s SS was permeated by occultism, viz. the use of runes in its symbol, pagan rituals, mythic imagery (including the black sun), ancestor-worship, timing of important events to coincide with the solstices, astrology (including “cosmic ice theory”), and the styling of the organisation as a modern knightly order. With its “Death’s Head” emblem and its treatment of fallen members as martyrs who joined mythic ancestors, the SS was a death cult.
Yet, Nazi policy as a whole was hostile to occult organisations. Freemasonry, the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Mazdaznan movement were all banned in 1935.
Therefore, contrary to simplistic postwar attempts to blame the Nazi past on a demonic Hitler and “Nazi occultism” — which spawned a large body of sensationalist literature and documentary films (Goodrick-Clarke, 1992) — National Socialism was not, fundamentally, about occultism (notwithstanding its Aryan race mythology and paramilitary death cult).
Rather, National Socialism in this context was about inventing a pseudo-religious identity to replace Christianity (cf. Koonz, 2003, p. 143). A blend of Germanic mythology, Romantic nationalism, occult pseudoscience, and racial ideology served to sacralise National Socialism, replacing Christianity with a cult of race, blood, and destiny, to which total allegiance and self-sacrifice was owed.
